…my medieval islamic inspired embroidery project – from the medieval inspiration to an actual pattern or “an interesting journey” .3

And once again a posting about my most recent embroidery project – my medieval islamic inspired embroidery project for my dear mother-in-law, Gloria.
I can’t tell you how great it feels to find some time and peace to post about this project again. It is a very special project which is very close to my heart.

I intended to write my next posting about it earlier but then life happened. Yeah, the last two weeks were quite rough on me. I twisted my ankle quite badly and if that wasn’t already enough, I also got a really bad stomach bug. However, there is no cause for concern – my ankle as well as my digestive system are fortunately healing steady. I should be soon my bouncy, normal self again. *giggle*

…and now back to my never ending attempt to catch up with posting about all of my projects. Well, I know, that’s wishful thinking but at least I don’t give up on trying… 😉

And now let us take a closer look at todays topic. In one of my previous postings about this project – “…my medieval islamic inspired embroidery project – from the medieval inspiration to an actual pattern or “an interesting journey” .1” – I wrote about my struggle with the actual medieval Arabic inscription and how I finally managed to solve the problem with some help. And today we are finally taking a look at the outlines for my medieval Arabic inscription – enjoy! 😀

At the picture above you can see the initial outlines for my medieval islamic inspired embroidery project.   

I started off with just a simple idea of how big I wanted the pouch to be as I knew that Gloria, my mother-in-law would prefer a bigger pouch over a smaller one. Then I took a look at the actual period piece and its specifications to find out the width-to-height ratio of the original piece. With this information in mind I tried to scale the desired size of the bag to match it as good as possible to the original embroidery.

Then I marked the rectangle outlines on the fabric with a simple pencil and added more horizontal lines to mark the distances between the major visible design parts of the embroidery. And then I simply started filling in the Arabic inscription, the placeholder for the owl and finally the last part of the inscription.

 

Btw., do you see the pencil line on the right which goes through the last part of the Arabic inscription? Yeah, I finished with more Arabic inscription than space. But that was not a problem at all as I simply enlarged the design to the right.

…and maybe some of you already noticed that the initial design at this point didn’t involve the owl at the bottom. Yeah, this part was actually not planned until I had a discussion with another member of the “Order of the Velvet Owl”. The concern was raised that the small owl at the top might not be enough to distinguish this bag as a “regalia” of the “Order of the Velvet Owl”. Therefore I added the commonly used sign for the “Order of the Velvet Owl” at the bottom in order to become a dominant part of the whole embroidery and also added a little frame around it to make it stand out even more. 🙂

And yeah, the color combination for the final piece gave me quite some head ache until I finally found a combination which seemed to work fine:

Yeah, it’s great when a plan works out, isn’t it… Btw. take a look at the embroidered slanted sections in the back of the middle section – it’s one of the many small details which I love about this embroidery: I always used the “missing” third color to separate the sections and I think it gives it a nice extra… 😀 

More about this medieval inspired embroidery project will follow soon. Though I unfortunately didn’t get to take many photos of my progress due to the shortage of time, I tried to take photos of the more interesting steps whenever I found some time. 🙂

…and as I just got the permission from Our lovely Princess to talk about my next project – well, guess who is going to make the coronation dress – a 12th century bliaut… I feel very honored but damn, I am sooooo nervous now… 

…and here you can find some other postings about this project:

• my super secret project revealed: OvO pouch with medieval islamic inspired embroidery
• Gloria’s OvO pouch with medieval islamic inspired embroidery – my period inspiration
• …my medieval islamic inspired embroidery project – from the medieval inspiration to an actual pattern or “an interesting journey” .1
• …my medieval islamic inspired embroidery project – from the medieval inspiration to an actual pattern or “an interesting journey” .2